David Henry Francis Wicker

Everything ran on two paid Vercel teams and nine Neon databases, about $385 a month, most of it Neon computes kept awake by every-minute jobs. On 26 October 2026 I moved all twelve apps to one rented server in Falkenstein, running Coolify.

Each repository got a migration: Neon drivers to plain Postgres, Vercel queues to a Postgres job queue, Vercel cron to scheduled tasks, Clerk and Neon Auth to Better Auth with users imported and their IDs kept, Liveblocks to self-hosted Hocuspocus, Vercel Blob to S3. Mail, analytics, monitoring and nightly backups to another region came up the same day. It now costs about €82 a month and nothing leaves the EU except calls to AI providers.

My work spans the search interface, shared interface packages, the account service, scoped API access and rate limits, the split into separate services, Docker deployment and server operations, and parts of the pipeline that extracts and normalises decisions from Dutch, ECHR and EU sources.

The platform builds on earlier Case Law Explorer work and a wider research group in Maastricht. The centrality paper accepted at ICAIL 2026 came out of the same corpus.

In June 2025, working through Code.X and the Gazan Student Support Network, I proposed to Maastricht University that it evacuate and admit students from Gaza. The university had the will; we had the operational knowledge, and work started straight away.

For months I met the university’s Student Service Centre every week, managed each student’s documents, coordinated the issuing of passports with a minister at the Palestinian Authority, and travelled to Rome to collect them in person. In September 2025 the university formally welcomed the students, and I supported them and their families through their first months in Maastricht: housing, school enrolment, everyday life.

The same model informed IUPALS, Italian Universities for Palestinian Students, which I helped establish. Run by the Conference of Italian University Rectors with two ministries, its university corridors had evacuated 229 students from Gaza by May 2026.

All of this happened alongside a full-time degree, my research work at BISS and the programme ambassador role, and it is why my degree is taking longer than three years. No student is named or pictured here.

1. Jun 2025Proposal to Maastricht University; work begins
2. Summer 2025Weekly meetings with the Student Service Centre; documents and passports
3. 2025Passports collected in person in Rome
4. Sep 2025Students formally welcomed by the university
5. May 2026IUPALS corridors reach 229 students evacuated to Italy

Since October 2023 school in Gaza has largely stopped: classes cancelled, buildings destroyed, families displaced, the internet unreliable. Code.X, a volunteer-run nonprofit from Silicon Valley, and the Gazan Student Support Network (GSSN), a volunteer network of school counsellors and university admissions professionals, work on two halves of the same problem.

Tutoring. The Gaza Mentorship Program pairs high-school students in Gaza with volunteer mentors around the world: weekly video calls and daily text check-ins, help with English, maths, science and computer science, and preparation for the Tawjihi, the SAT or ACT and the Duolingo English Test. As lead coordinator I design and evaluate the programme, recruit mentors and match them with students, and run their training, support and communication. I also teach English and introductory coding myself.

University pathways. With GSSN we help students, displaced or still inside the Strip, apply to universities abroad and win scholarships, and we work with universities that want to set up scholarship places for students from Gaza. An offer is only one step. A student still has to get documents recognised, obtain a visa, be evacuated, arrive, and keep being supported once enrolled, so we coordinate each of those handoffs. The evacuations to Maastricht and Italy, above, came out of this work.

No student is named here. Each institution gets the information it needs for its decision and nothing more, and the student can pause or withdraw at any point.

1. ApplyProgramme fit, applications, test scores, scholarships
2. DocumentsCredentials, translation and recognition, identity papers
3. EvacuationVisas, evacuation, travel and contingency plans
4. ArrivalRegistration, housing, insurance, banking
5. ContinuityAcademic, financial and personal support after enrolment

I took part in a documentation mission across the West Bank in April 2025. Its results were submitted to the office of the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, and I continue the work with established human rights organisations. The public atlas is built from my part of the fieldwork.

I met Katie Redford, a lawyer who defends environmental activists, after the legal trouble that followed the occupation of the European Parliament in 2019. Through her I joined a meeting of activists at the Rockefeller Foundation’s centre in Bellagio, with people fighting similar battles elsewhere, among them Ka Hsaw Wa and Farhana Yamin. The interview I gave later became part of the book.

Back from Armenia, I felt responsible for explaining what was happening there. With a student of Armenian origin I built a series of seminars on Armenia’s history and culture and on the reasons behind the conflict with Azerbaijan. The school made it part of that year’s civic education programme.

After the Italian UWC committee’s selection in 2020 I was given a partial scholarship to study at UWC Dilijan, a school with students from more than 90 countries. I completed the first year of the IB Diploma before the renewed fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan meant returning to Italy.

Outside class I was elected to the sustainability committee, which negotiated energy-saving measures and solar panels with the school and set up recycling with the town and a Yerevan NGO. I helped lead outdoor trips, including a week-long trek through the mountains and the ski trips to Tsaghkadzor, photographed for the yearbook, ran logistics for TEDxYouth@UWCDilijan and organised an online climate panel with scientists and activists.

I ran sessions on activism with Alexandria Villaseñor and Ayisha Siddiqa and acted as go-between for the invited activists and the TED team over a panel with Shell’s then chief executive, Ben van Beurden. When he spoke, a group of us walked out and asked the audience to leave with us.

The book was later used to build a climate and activism curriculum for schools in Massachusetts, run by the organisation behind it.

Ezio Maisto followed us for a year, filming the strikes and protests I was part of. The film was awarded at the Cinemambiente festival in Turin.

With a group of university students I started the weekly strikes in Turin. It grew quickly: national coordination, an international network, and a year of strikes, meetings and actions across Europe.

1. Jan 2019Founded Fridays for Future Turin with university students; strikes every Friday.
2. Mar 2019With Miriam Martinelli and Vincenzo Mautone, represented Italy at a meeting in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, drafting the movement’s first charter of goals.
3. 15 Mar 2019On the international committee for the first global strike, and organised Turin’s: more than 30,000 people.
4. Spring 2019Helped set up the Italian coordination and the international network, including their first websites and channels.
5. Apr 2019Part of the small delegation that met Greta Thunberg and the President of the Senate in Rome, alongside a strike of more than 50,000 in Piazza del Popolo.
6. May 2019Invited to the strike in Brussels before the European elections; we camped at the entrance of the Parliament, and some of us were arrested.
7. Jun 2019Led the Italian delegation of 30 to the first international strike in Aachen, by bus through Basel.
8. Aug 2019Helped organise the second international meeting in Lausanne, named it SMILE, and ran the selection of the Italian delegation.
9. 2019Co-wrote climate-emergency motions for my hometown, Buttigliera Alta, and for Turin. Both passed.
10. Dec 2019Organised Greta Thunberg’s stop at the Friday strike in Turin in two days: a stage, sound and the police liaison.

In my first year I built an app that helped teachers pick students for oral tests. I balanced school with the climate work above, spent a year away at UWC Dilijan, and represented the school in the Reply Code Challenge.